Evolution is Everywhere

Evolution is one of my great interests. I've noticed lately how evolution is implied in so much, and well beyond biology. It is found in social environments, and in business. It is possibly everywhere. Today's link shows how the same ecological process, operating in opposite directions, can be found in fiction and in non-fiction.

I'm currently reading The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired. The title refers to the huge number of products that sell rarely if at all. However, the internet economy has now made these items viable products. The business opportunities represented by these goods are collectively comparable to the few 'hits' at the 'head' of the distribution. (See the figure, below, from www.thelongtail.com, Anderson's website.) At one point in the book, Anderson describes these goods in ecological terms. It's as if the top-selling products were always there as islands that show above the water line. Now the ocean is receding, and revealing all those other items that are now available. I read this as saying that many niches are now viable business opportunities.

What about the opposite situation? In the novel Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut describes what happens when a group of tourists are stranded on an island while the rest of the human race contracts a mysterious disease that prevents them from reproducing. In technical terms, the genetic pool is dramatically bottlenecked. Vonnegut mashes up time and space and life and death and ghosts in his usual hilarious format, and describes how an accident saves the human race, but leads to an unusual evolutionary twist.

Geek MBA

I just got some news that saddened my geeky soul. Gary Gygax, the creator of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, passed away this past week (NY Times Obituary). While it's been years since I've played, there's definitely still a soft spot in me for one of the great pasttimes of my geeky adolescence.

In that spirit, I'd like to make a connection that was really surprising to me when it first came up (but is perhaps obvious in hindsight). With the rising popularity of massive, multiuser online games such as World of Warcraft, it was perhaps inevitable that the skills developed by gaming would be analyzed in some depth. The surprising thing is that some or many of these skills are now thought to be useful in the business world.

The Harvard Business Review ran a list in the February 2008 issue of the Breakthrough Ideas for 2008. Among this list were articles entitled, 'The Gamer Disposition' and, 'Making Alternate Reality the New Business Reality.' (Here's the complete list.) So it was basically a surprise that geeky gaming has gone mainstream and is now considered conducive to good business. (And here's a further discussion.) On top of all this, a recent NY Times Op-Ed discussed how role-playing games help people to understand each other. I didn't think I got any of that from D&D.

Here's to D&D, and to Gary Gygax. It's amazing how it's gone from a sure sign of Satan worship to indicative of business competency.

Strange endings and beginnings

I'm going to make a link today between the book Barney's Version by Modecai Richler, and the movie Magnolia, directed by PT Anderson. But the strange thing is that I'll only provide a hint as to why.

Barney's Version is about an aging Montreal Jew who is convinced to write his memoirs as a defense against accusations in the autobiography of an enemy. The story itself, the characterization of Barney, are all incredible. He's tough to love if you imagine yourself actually knowing him, but easy to smile with as he tells his own version of his life story. He was accused of the murder of his best friend, was found innocent, and is incredibly upset at his best friend for disappearing. But his best friend was sleeping with Barney's third wife. Barney is an increasingly unreliable narrator, which always makes for an interesting story, and Mordecai Richler does not fail to entertain and enrich.

In addition to a great story with a curmudgeonly character, Barney recalls all sorts of places and times that strangely overlap parts of my parents' and grandparents' generations: Barney, the storyteller, was apparently born sometime in between those two generations (Richler himself was born in 1931, closer to my grandparents), and a number of places that he describes could very well have been out of my own family's history. But my enjoyment of this book went well beyond how the book touched me personally.

Magnolia is about the strange intersections of a number of characters in modern Los Angeles. The ensemble cast is incredible, with such powerful acting as so many strange events unfold and personalities are revealed, that it is truly a riveting movie. Tom Cruise and Julianne Moore cut loose, Phillip Seymour Hoffman is dreadfully tender, Phillip Baker Hall and Jason Robards are filled with such profound regret... and there's more as well. Really, watch it.

The thing is, that the movie is about coincidence as much as anything else - the coincidence that these so very different characters lives are all intertwined in some fashion: As one character says at a pivotal moment, "This happens. This is something that happens." This is the sort of coincidence that links this movie to this book. Highlight it to discover the spoiler: Several people die in unlikely ways in the movie, and the manner of one of those deaths is the key to solving the mystery of Barney's Version. Enjoy the trailer...

Connections for The Confused Young Man

The Tao Of Steve, starring Donal Logue and High Fidelity, starring John Cusack and based on the book by Nick Hornby.

I re-watched these movies this month and they both deal, in part, with the 30-something male crisis of Settling Down. Get out the popcorn and have a boys night!

(Hmm maybe boys don't do that.)

Gore/Card/Friedman/Clarke Started It All - Part 3

Richard Clarke also wrote a fictional account of a near-world-war-three in the near future in Breakpoint. The global politics and technological advancements closely follow the trends discussed in Al Gore's and Thomas Friedman's books. Richard Clarke was the counter-terrorism czar whose warnings were ignored prior to 9/11. He has thought about how terrorism may occur in the digital age possibly more deeply and realistically than anyone else.

These four books all went really well together. It was a complete coincidence that I happened on them at the same time. And I recommend them all.

Gore/Card/Friedman/Clarke Started It All - Part 2

Moving from non-fiction to fiction:

The left/right clashes of Al Gore's book are taken one step further by Orson Scott Card's fictional account of a second civil war in the near future in Empire. The first two thirds or so was very realistic; it only became sci-fi in the last third or so, when flying machines and giant exoskeletons showed up for war.